WebLayers Center for Industry Frameworks


Enterprises want to seamlessly integrate business processes as well as with their business partners. XML provides a standard language and is a great foundation for this capability, but many other issues need to be addressed including:

  • Agreement on common taxonomies and message structures
  • Overcoming interoperability issues
  • Communicate proprietary information and extensions

There are several industry organizations that have been created to address these issues by creating common standards that are agreed upon amongst cooperating parties. These industry standards define common taxonomies and message structures, interoperability rules, and allow managed extensions. Examples include: ACORD for

Challenges

There are several challenges when implementing these industry frameworks:

  • The internal knowledge gap to understand what the standards entail and how to comply with them
  • How to make compliance efforts efficient and scalable
  • Ensuring services are compliant as early in the life cycle of development as possible
  • Measuring and monitoring the compliance level of services that are provided or consumed from business partners

WebLayers Center Solution

WebLayers Center solution for Industry Frameworks extends the core automated governance capabilities to meet the unique needs as enterprises embrace industry frameworks. Key capabilites include:

  • Import and validate standard schemas (or your own custom schemas/extensions) into WebLayers Center
  • Provide visibility to development teams on proper usage. If users deviate from the specification (either accidentally or intentionally), WebLayers Center will warn or prevent them from wasting time.
  • Automatic compliance checks at each step. Using WebLayers Center deployed Governors, developer IDEs (such as Eclipse) as well as source control, build environments and metadata repositories will ensure compliance.
  • Architects and Reviewers have complete visibility to provide rapid and accurate guidance to project teams as necessary.
  • Business Partners can develop their services independently but you can maintain control before they are consumed. All services (internal or external) are automatically checked for conformance to standards before they are moved into production.
  • Governance experts have full control over configuration of the standards which are centrally managed within the WebLayers Center server and secured by access control settings.

Supported Industry Standards

WebLayers Center solution for Industry Frameworks provides out-of-the-box support for the following standards:

Standard Description
IFX The Interactive Financial eXchange (IFX) specification is a mature, well-designed XML-based, financial messaging protocol, built by financial industry and technology leaders incorporating decades of combined experience and best of breed design principles.
ACORD ACORD (Association for Cooperative Operations Research and Development) is a global, nonprofit insurance association whose mission is to facilitate the development and use of standards for the insurance, reinsurance and related financial services industries.
OAGis The Open Applications Group Integration Specification (OAGIS) is an effort to provide a canonical business language for information integration. It uses XML as the common alphabet for defining business messages, and for identifying business processes (scenarios) that allow businesses and business applications to communicate.
FIXML FIXML is the FIX Markup Language for application messages. It is an XML-derived language, encompassing a series of Document Type Definitions (DTDs) which define the formal representation of FIXML messages.
FpML FpML® (Financial products Markup Language) is the business information exchange standard for electronic dealing and processing of financial derivatives instruments. It establishes a new protocol for sharing information on, and dealing in swaps, derivatives and structured products.
SWIFTML swiftML was created by the Swift, which is an industry owned cooperative providing messaging services to banks, broker-dealers and investment managers as well as to market infrastructures in payments, treasury, securities and trade.